


Still I Carry This Feeling

by sensitivebore



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: F/M, Songfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-23
Updated: 2013-02-23
Packaged: 2017-12-03 09:12:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/696662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sensitivebore/pseuds/sensitivebore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carson and Hughes, love so fragile. [Features lyrics from Leather and Lace, written by Stevie Nicks.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Still I Carry This Feeling

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kouw](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kouw/gifts).



**I. _You're saying I'm fragile, I try not to be._**

She fusses over him more these days, while at the same time fighting with him more. He doesn't know what to make of it, he's not sure what it's supposed to be. One moment she's shielding him from petty squabbles and infighting among the others, the next she's taunting him, overriding his decisions, making jest of him. He never knows which way he's turning in her wake, if he's pleased her or displeased her; when he tries to do one it seems he does the other. He tries not to be too bothered by it, but he is, always, because he's always been bothered by her. She's always been there working patiently at his heart and he's tried to shut her out, bar the door, but somehow she had smilingly picked all of his careful locks and slipped in. How had she done that? He hadn't even noticed when suddenly she was indispensible, when he couldn't give or take the heated nighttime thoughts, when his chest would constrict with fright at the thought of losing her. 

She thinks him fragile, he knows that; fragile and easily vexed and someone who needs patted down and coaxed and soothed a lot of the time. The devil of it is, she's not half-wrong. He's not sure when that happened, either, when he started needing her to run interference for him, when everything suddenly became so much easier, so much better, when she was there as a buffer between him and the rest of a changing world that he doesn't understand. He doesn't much like it, that she knows it, because he's a man - and isn't a man supposed to be the protector, the guardian, the solid wall between his woman and the hard realities of life?

But she is not his woman. She is her own woman.

But he is most certainly her man.

**II.** _**I am stronger than you know.** _

He worries about her all the time, she can feel it radiating from his big body when they're together. She doesn't miss the thousand and one concerned glances, the semi-covert measurements of her breath, her color, the steadiness of her hands. She's sometimes too brusque with him, too sarcastic, but she always hopes it'll put some of his anxiety to rest that she's not going anywhere. She's just fine, feels stronger than she ever has, is ready to face whatever life wants to throw at her next, and she doesn't know if it were being so frightened or so relieved, but she's sure now that he's very much what she wants life to throw at her. He's been there all along, of course, and she's shyly tapped at the walls between them, hoping for some kind of admission - even when she was unsure as to what would happen next, what she wanted to happen. He's answered here and again, done his own careful knocking. Now, though, now she's not tapping anymore, there's no time for such nonsense when either of them could be dead on a slab tomorrow, when there's so little time left for them. Now she's pounding on those dividers and trying every key on her hip in the locks and, surely enough, she thinks the doors are springing open, one by one by one. 

Though she is strong, she worries about him; he is far more fragile than he looks, than he seems, than he'd ever have anyone know. He's holding tight to a way of life that's crumbling all around them, a life that he was born and bred into as sure as anyone upstairs, and he's too big, too solid to step quickly on shifting ground the way she does. He needs a moat, a river, some sort of protection from all of the change swirling around them, and she thinks perhaps that's her final job, her sweetest promotion. After all, isn't she the keeper of the keys? Doesn't she secure the gates against intruders?

Hasn't she always been his first line of defense?

**III. _With you to light my nights._**

She invites him to her parlor every night now, and one of those nights, after the tea, after the talk, after the shared commiseration and wry laughs and tired stretches of leg and back, she had stood and leaned over him. Leaned over him there sitting by the fire and kissed him, kissed him again. Smooth palms cupping his face, she had kissed him and kissed him and smiled against his mouth, carefully lowered herself onto his knee, sat with her warm face tucked into his neck. He had said nothing, just collected her body close to his, held her in the circle of his arms, and accepted that his answer was yes. Yes to her, yes to them, yes to all of it. After years of being wary, of choosing this over that, them over us, upstairs over down, all of the misgivings and the second-guesses fell away when she leaned over him in the firelight, eyes shining, hands strong, breathing and smiling. Yes to all of it.

He had known all along that should this happen, should she offer the hand he couldn't extend, make the move he couldn't make, he'd never want to leave.

And so he doesn't. Night after night, she smiles at him by the fire, and she kisses him and sits on his knee, and he tries to think of reasons they shouldn't be doing any of it, but strangely enough, nary a one ever comes to mind.

Perhaps there were never any to start with.

**IV. _I knew I'd never want to leave._**

She kissed him because something had to give, someone had to take a step and she knew he couldn't. It wasn't from lack of wanting to, it was simply he didn't know how to place his feet on unfamiliar terrain and so he stood frozen and waiting for someone to show him how to cross what seemed to him treacherous ground. So she kissed him, and she held his lovely face to her covered breast, and curled against him, and the intensity of it all has surprised her. So much of that she had thought long dead, so much of that she had ruthlessly stamped out, but now it seems the embers were just covered and not extinguished inside of her. It gets harder each night to stand up, to go back to her own seat so he can take his leave, to face her own bedroom alone. It gets harder and it seems less and less understandable. Fifteen years they've slept in separate beds instead of one. Fifteen years their bodies have drawn in on themselves for lack of touch, of warmth, of love.

Fifteen years they've had hearts so hollow, and now a kiss and the line of his jaw and the soft pouches beneath his eyes have filled her up; they've not consumed her, just flowed gently into that starveling space she's carried in her chest for so long and left it finally full, finally not aching, finally something not empty.

How did they get so confused along the way? How did they keep losing track of one another when they ate every meal at the same table, day in and day out? But these are idle questions that she doesn't spend a lot of time examining, because the answers are neither here nor there. What is here is now, what is here is his hand on her hip, the width of his shoulder, the strong thighs she sits on every evening.

Every night, harder to leave, easier to stay. Every night, everything easier that should be harder, everything harder that should be easier.

She smiles.

**V. _Give to me your leather._**

He opens her gift that afternoon at their kitchen table, it's the first chance he's had to do so between arranging the house and cleaning and rearranging. She's out in the yard, pegging out wash because she refuses to sleep their first night in their first proper bed without newly-clean and ironed sheets. Carefully, he unties the plain white ribbon and unfolds the crisp parchment, layer after layer, until he's looking at the most beautiful book, the loveliest volume, expensive and softly-tooled and he opens the cover to read the title and his eyes grow a bit moist - he has always been the sentimental one, after all - at the inscription. It's _The Time Machine_ , a novel he's not familiar with yet - she is the reader of Gothic, of horror, of science-fiction - but there is her pretty curling handwriting below the title.

_Yesterday and tomorrow are a prettily-matched pair, Mr. Carson, much like you and I._

He closes the book, strokes the cover with a gentle hand. Puts it carefully on their bookcase that he's arranged by alphabet, by author's last name, carefully, exactly.

Except this one he files under _H._

Suddenly, he turns then, goes to find her in their little backyard garden. There's no sheets on their bed yet, but when he bundles her off laughing in his arms to the bedroom a few minutes later, she doesn't complain about it. After all, they're hardly going to sleep.

**VI. _Take from me my lace._**

It is their third Christmas together post-marriage and it's been a nice one. She bought him thick new sweaters to keep him warm while he's potting in the garden, a new book of poems, baked him a tin of his favorite shortbread biscuits. He had only one gift for her, but he had saved fastidiously for months to get it and it took two seamstresses to make it and she was so pleased her cheeks went pink and she bit her lip over and over in that way she had. She had longed for something pretty to put on their bed; the quilt was white and warm and thick but so very plain, and she has been trying to learn stitchery and needlecraft but she's not very good at it and has despaired of ever having a pretty counterpane. When she opens the big box, pulls out the shimmer of fine, strong lace, shakes it out, it opens into perfect folds of intricate tatwork, crocheted with the smallest needles, opening in starburst after starburst of seemingly-fragile snowflake design. She had been unable to speak, unable to even thank him, but she had looked at him again and again with bright eyes and a brighter smile, had touched his face with happy fingers over and over before putting it carefully in their bedroom.

It's late now and the candles are burning low and he's sitting in bed reading a few last lines from his poetry volume. He's soft in the moonlight with his sleepy eyes, and she smiles, touches his leg beneath the blanket and he looks up and breathes out, breathes in, breathes out, puts his book aside, doesn't bother to mark his place. She's standing at the foot of the bed and her hair is down falling around her -- she doesn't often, it's usually bound in its neat braid -- and she's wearing nothing but the lace counterpane held gently around her breasts with one hand. 

She smiles.

"Merry Christmas, Mr. Carson."

When it's quieter later, after they've made love, she sends up the same prayer she sends up every night. _Stay with me_ , she thinks afterwards, holding him warm and drowsy in her arms, holding him as if angels are descending to bear him away at that very moment. It's just they've so little time, so little, he's sixty-eight now, he will leave her in a few years, but until then this night and every night she will fend that day off with her fierce whispered demand.

_Stay with me, stay._

Night after night, he does. And she does, as well, because her angry little plea doesn't spiral upward to heaven alone; no, it goes with his, like everything they do.

So they stay.

Finally.


End file.
